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R300 drivers with DRI support

In post-2.6.13 development kernels, DRM support for the R300 chips from ATI has been included. Together with a bleeding-edge version of Mesa (at least 6.3.2), this will allow 3D acceleration support for systems having a chip like this without the need for the ATI binary only driver. The latest beta releases of X.Org for 6.9/7.0 already have Mesa 6.3.2, but building the R300 DRI drivers is disabled by default.

Kernel configuration

You need to build AGP support with

# CONFIG_AGP=y
# CONFIG_AGP_INTEL=y #for a ThinkPad T41p

and the Radeon DRM support with

# CONFIG_DRM=y
# CONFIG_DRM_RADEON=y

Alternatively, can also build modules instead of including the code into the kernel. The modules will then be automatically loaded when X starts up.

If everything works well, the device /dev/dri/card0 should show up.

Mesa

If your distribution does not offer binary packages of the current Mesa development packages, you need to build them yourself. It might also be possible that the DRI driver is included in your X.Org packages, just look out for a file like /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/r300_dri.so.